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Pragmatism, as a school of philosophy, is a collection of many different ways of thinking. Given the diversity among thinkers and the variety among schools of thought that have adopted this term over the years, the term pragmatism has become all but meaningless in the absence of further qualification. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists point to some connection with practical consequences or real effects as vital components of both meaning and truth. The precise character of these links to pragmata is however as diverse as the thinkers who do the pointing.

Some pragmatists object to the view that beliefs represent reality, and instead argue that beliefs are dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful a disposition proves in accomplishing the believer's goals. For this type of pragmatist it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire meaning, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it becomes true. As a rule, however, pragmatists do not hold that anything that is practical or useful, or that anything that helps to survive merely in the short-term, should be regarded as true. Instead, most of them argue that what should be taken as true is that which contributes the most good over the longest course. In the case of C.S. Peirce's pragmatism, this means that theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices — that is, one should be able to make predictions and test them. Truth is defined, for Peirce, as the ultimate outcome of inquiry by a (usually) scientific community of investigators. For William James and many of his followers, the meaning of any term consisted, rather, in the grasping of the consequences for action that the acceptance of the truth of the term entails. Truth itself, on this view, is not that which contributes the most good to the community, but that which contributes the most good to the individual.

Like any philosophical movement, the nature and content of pragmatism is subject to considerable debate, whether it is one of exegesis (determining what the original pragmatists thought it was) or subtantive philosophical theory (what is the most defensible theory that satisfies certain goals). The term pragmatism was first used in print by James, who attributed the main ideas of this "old way of thinking" to Peirce. But Peirce would go on to criticize certain directions that the movement took, coining the new name pragmaticism to mark what he regarded as the original idea.

What is common to all three thinkers' philosophy — and with other loosely affiliated thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes — is a broad emphasis on the importance of practical effects in connection with theoretical ideas as they impact on the human way of life in general and the life of inquiry in particular. One famous aspect of this view is Peirce's insistence that contrary to Descartes' famous and influential method in the Meditations on First Philosophy, doubt cannot be feigned or created for the purpose of conducting philosophical inquiry. Doubt, like belief, requires justification, that is, it arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (from what Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter.

The questions of meaning, reality, and truth are inextricably linked in pragmatic thinking, making what is more tersely called the pragmatic theory of truth a central topic in the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, however differently each thinker may have expressed himself on the subject. James especially had a penchant for the well-turned phrase, not all of whose consequences for misunderstanding he foresaw in the act of utterance, and many of his best-turned phrases — "truth's cash value" (1907, p. 200) and "the true is only the expedient" (1907, p. 222) — would be taken out of context and turned against the utterer afterwards. As a result, the pragmatic account is often caricatured in contemporary literature as the view that 'truth is what works', or that any idea that has practical utility is true. In reality the theory is a great deal more subtle, and bears a striking resemblance to better-respected contemporary views, particularly Crispin Wright's 'superassertibility' (see his book Truth and Objectivity).

Late in the 20th century Hilary Putnam (1994, p. 152) "cursorily summarized" a group of theses that he regarded as being "the basis of the philosophies of Peirce, and above all of James and Dewey", namely these:

Antiskepticism. The thesis that doubt requires justification just as much as belief.

Fallibilism. The thesis that there is no metaphysical warrant that a given belief will never need modification.

[Pragmatism]. The doctrine that the whole "meaning" of a conception expresses itself in practical consequences, consequences either in the shape of conduct to be recommended, or in that of experiences to be expected, if the conception be true; which consequences would be different if it were untrue, and must be different from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequences, then it must really be only the first conception under a different name. In methodology it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences is an admirable way of establishing the differing meanings of different conceptions. (James 1902, cf. Peirce, CP 5.2).

Pragmatism is word in ordinary use, with senses that range from a term of abuse to a term of art. From time to time, a professional philosopher will pick up the banner of pragmatism with very little awareness, or little more than a nodding acknowledgment, of those who bore it before, and run off in a direction that bears but token kinship to the aims of its forebearers.

My pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell; and is, of course, very vague and undeveloped. The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain, but of nothing more definite. (Ramsey 1927/1990, p. 51).

Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism. Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic. (Quine 1951/1980, p. 46).

In the twentieth-century, the movements of logical positivism, behaviorism, and ordinary language philosophy all have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics. However, there is not the stress on action in logical positivism as there is in pragmatism. Furthermore, the pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to construct correct metaphysical doctrines (empirically verifiable ones) rather than reject metaphysics.

Ordinary language philosophy does not resemble pragmatism in many respects, but it does lay stress upon the connection between meaning and action in a way logical positivism does not.

Pragmatism has important ties to process philosophy. Each of the classical pragmatists formulated a type of process metaphysics, and much of their work developed in dialogue with process philosophers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, who aren't usually considered pragmatists. [1][2]Richard Rorty has pointed to strong connections between pragmatism and existentialism.[3]Nietzsche is also sometimes considered a process philosopher,[1] and his work has other similarities with pragmatism. Nietzsche and pragmatism also share a common influence in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. [4]. A form of pragmatism has also been attributed to Heidegger.[5]

William James (influential psychologist and theorist of religion, as well as philosopher. First to be widely associated with the term "pragmatism" due to Peirce's lifelong unpopularity.)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was the founder of American pragmatism (later called by Peirce pragmaticism), an extender of the Scotistic theory of signs (called by Peirce semeiotic), an extraordinarily prolific logician and mathematician, and a developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system. A practicing chemist and geodesist by profession, he nevertheless considered scientific philosophy, and especially logic, to be his vocation. In the course of his polymathic researches, he wrote on a wide range of topics, from mathematical logic to psychology.

Josiah Royce (colleague of James who employed pragmatism in an idealist metaphysical framework, he was particularly interested in the philosophy of religion and community; his work is often associated with neo-Hegelianism)